Thursday Poem - Rapture

Peepers, tiny tree frogs, punctuate the night,
their small song a promise of spring's return.
Overhead, the stars tap out their ancient stories,
and a comet appears, out of the darkest
reaches of space, from somewhere past Pluto.
The last time it came by, the Great Pyramids
were being built at Giza, Rome and Athens
were still centuries away, hunter-gatherers
roamed the Illinois Valley, and the Inuit
followed the rhythms of musk ox and caribou.

Now, in the new millennium,
we are bombarded daily with more information
than we can process, the endless
noise of television, more bad news
than the human heart can stand.

Standing here alone, under the blackboard
of night, away from any ambient light,
everything I know falls away,
and I'm back around the campfire, looking up at sparks
flying in the dark, seeing the comet every night
for weeks, its glowing heat, the luminous tail
thirty million miles long streaming and pulsing
like smoke from a single candle, a diaphanous scarf,
the breath of God. I am standing alone in this black night,
feet on the ground, mouth open, breathing in stars.

Barbara Crooker
(First published in Windhover)